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Charlie Cook: Another Out of Touch Liberal

You know when a liberal has lost any capability to understand the common American when they completely miss the pain that liberal tax hikers cause the average citizen in this country. Charlie Cook recently showed this elitist attitude in a National Journal column on the outrageous costs of the Cap and Trade bill – better called the Cap and Tax bill. Of course, to him, the tax hike on the average American is not a big deal and he doesn’t understand how anyone could be upset over it all.

Cook is perplexed why Washington pols were “getting an earful” from constituents over the energy tax hikes that the Cap and Trade bill will force on the nation. He just couldn’t figure why adding “only” an additional $175 a year to the average citizen’s electric bill was such a big deal.

Although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the average household would pay only an additional $175 per year in energy costs, perception is more important than reality. The perception is that this is a huge tax increase at a time when people can ill afford one. Hence, Democrats, whether they supported the bill or not, are getting battered, increasing their blood pressure.

Sure, another nearly $200 a year may not seem so bad… if that was the only tax hike that Barack Obama was proposing to slam the people with. But this is just yet another example of rising taxes that the Obama administration is championing. The tax hike on cigarettes, the end of the Bush tax cuts soon to come, the wild tax plans being floated to fund Obama’s take over of healthcare, all these are piling one on top of the other and voters are scared that soon they won’t be able to make even it day to day. And all this is coming out of Washington during one of the worst economies in decades when people are struggling already!

But to Cook, tax hikes to pass such a supposedly important bill as Cap and Trade should be accepted without question regardless of how it hurts the average citizen. Further, he just can’t see why another nearly $200 a year would hurt people of lower incomes.

The tax hike with Cap and Trade is bad enough, but what should anger Americans most about this bill is not necessarily just the high taxes it will impose on us all. Amazingly, the fact that bills similar to our Cap and Trade bill that passed in New Zealand, Australia, France and other western nations have proven such an economic fiasco that those nations are either eliminating their carbon emissions laws or suspending them. Yet here is Barack Obama pushing the same garbage that other nations are dumping on top of adding to the tax burden for all of us. Can’t he learn from their mistakes?

That isn’t so smart for the smartest president ever, is it?

Last, I find it amazing that Cook even believed the simplistic analysis peddled by the CBO that Cap and Tax will impose “only an additional $175” to American’s tax burden. This may be true strictly with their electric bills, but the additional costs of Cap and Tax do not only affect electric bills. The entire energy industry will be affected and this extra cost incurred will cascade down to every citizen in higher prices on just about everything they buy throughout the year. So, the electric bill prices raised on consumers won’t be the only place that the pain of Cap and Tax will show up in their yearly budgets.

But why should Charlie Cook take much notice of how Washington can hurt the average American? Why struggle to understand how the average American would be a tad upset over rising taxes? It won’t hurt him and his friends and that is all he notices.